Four mini-shows at the Cleveland Institute of Art survey powerful talents from around the world

A quartet of new, highly diverse exhibitions at the Cleveland Institute of Art stretches the eye, the mind and the possibilities of art.

The four mini-exhibitions range from a super slow-motion film of New York street life by British-born James Nares to the recent, eye-jangling Op Art paintings of 1953 art institute graduate Richard Anuszkiewicz.

Sandwiched between these two wildly diverse displays is a vast series of pencil drawings, alchemical diagrams, a drawn deck of Tarot cards and a video by Suzanne Treister of London and a series of dreamlike figurative watercolors by Arpita Singh of New Delhi.

All four shows appeared in New York galleries or museums last year or earlier this year, and were highly praised. Seeing them here is like making a quick trip to the Chelsea gallery district. It’s pointless to look for connections among these artists – and probably not necessary. It’s better instead to savor the contrasts as you move from one exhibit to another. Consider it an artistic workout.

Anuszkiewicz participated in the pivotal 1965 “Responsive Eye” exhibition at the museum of Modern Art in New York that launched the Op movement and the career of Cleveland artist Julian Stanczak, another Op stalwart.

The recent paintings by Anuszkiewicz show a steadfast commitment to the notion that precise geometric arrangements of complementary hues – the ones on the opposite side of a traditional color wheel – can create a vibrant, scintillating effect, a kind of visual electricity.

But Anuszkiewicz is doing more than hanging on to a chosen métier. At 83, he’s painting with verve, energy and a sense of joy. His vibrating rectangles and squares of contrasting hues are ebullient and optimistic. In comparison, Stanczak’s Op paintings are magisterial, restrained and perhaps even somber. It’s like the contrast between classical chamber music and jazz. Anuszkiewicz remains extremely upbeat about what he’s doing, and the feeling is contagious.

The Nares film, entitled “Street,” was hailed as a hypnotic masterpiece during its run at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 61-minute film consists of slow-motion pans shot from an SUV of pedestrians on New York sidewalks.

Nares used a camera capable of shooting high-resolution digital images in six-second bursts. These segments, tiled together and shown in super slow motion, turn street life into a ballet in which non-recurring characters are captured in scenes that seem indelibly to capture something essential of their identity, perhaps even their souls.

It’s as if normal life occurs too quickly for us to be able to appreciate the miracle of everyday events. But Nares’ camera sees all – the stunning beauty of rain hitting umbrellas, the graceful slalom of a young man as he zigzags through oncoming pedestrians without slamming into them, a pigeon flying gracefully past the lens.

Video art can be a tedious experience that leaves one checking one’s watch. That’s not how one feels during the Nares piece. It’s mesmerizing, from beginning to end.

Treister’s massive collection of drawings, “Hexen 2.0,” is an impassioned exploration of the alliance between government and science in research on mind control – whether on the scale of the individual or vast populations. Accordingly, she touches on programs such as MKUltra, the illegal Central Intelligence Agency project in the 1950s and ‘60s that included administering LSD to unwitting participants.

Framed by the score and organized in rows that march across the gallery walls, the drawings comprise a vast deck of individually sketched Tarot cards, along with pencil-drawn renderings of key 20th-century books with utopian or dystopian themes, and photo-based images of attendees at the Macy Conferences from 1946 to 1953, a gathering of scholars who attempted to chart a general science of the human mind.

It’s a heady mix, and it’s not always quite clear what Treister is getting at. In general, her heavy use of writing makes "Hexen 2.0" feel less like a visually self-reliant work of art than a massive historical download that’s intended to pique curiosity and direct one’s attention toward the avenues of intellectual history that obviously fascinate and worry her.

Arpita Singh’s watercolors and drawings are enigmatic and highly personal meditations on urban life in a mid-century Modernist style that appears to glance back at Cubism and ahead to the gritty political tableaux of Leon Golub.

Like Golub, Singh scrapes away at the painted surfaces of her watercolors to excavate highlights that give her images an abraded, partially eroded texture.

Populated by packs of armed men and filled with urgent signs and diagrams that evoke spaghetti-like street networks, Singh’s images evoke the disorienting and congested vitality of the world’s megacities, particularly those of India. The precise context and cultural meaning of these works isn't made clear by the show, but their richness and visual eloquence need no further explanation.

It’s hard to say how the four mini-shows at the art institute add up. In sum, they don’t sum. They present four sharply distinct and distinctive sensibilities, as if the institution were behaving like a gallery with a stable of diverse talents.

The art institute could have done more to provide biographical and artistic context for the works on view, and perhaps to explain why it made the particular choices that resulted in the four-part display. But what matters most is the quality of the works on view, which is superb. That's what counts most.

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